Rian Johnson Reveals First Cut of ‘Last Jedi’ Was Over 3 Hours (VIDEO)

When we first found out that The Last Jedi was going to be the longest Star Wars movie to date, we really had no clue that it was actually once even longer. That's right, folks, writer/director Rian Johnson's first cut of The Last Jedi ran over three hours, meaning there's at least thirty minutes worth of close-to-complete footage that could go into an extended cut, right? Not so fast.

In this new video interview with Collider, Johnson admits that it was always planned to be a long movie, but it's a better film at two and a half hours than it was at three, so don't expect him to re-edit the film for a future "director's cut."

“I’m really not into [releasing an extended cut]. I feel like the cut is what it is because I feel like it’s the best version of the movie, so the ‘director’s cut’ is the movie that’s going out in theaters. All the deleted scenes, no matter how much I love them, they came out for a reason and it’s all for the greater good of the movie itself. You can watch the deleted scenes on their own, I think that’s the way to watch them, but the movie is definitely the best version of the movie I think.”

Don't fret, however, as this will not be another Rogue One situation where we'll never see deleted scenes because they belong to a completely different cut of the film. Johnson says that the Blu-ray release will indeed have deleted scenes, and some good ones at that...

“A lot of really good stuff came out in the edit. I actually just reviewed the deleted scenes we’re gonna have on the Blu-ray. There’s a bunch of—some of my favorite scenes ended up having to come out just structurally… There’s a lot of really substantial, really good scenes. There’s a couple whole sequences actually that we lifted out. It’s weirdly—and this always happens—it’s like your babies you have to kill. It’s some of my favorite stuff from the movie.”

I'm glad that Lucasfilm isn't keeping everything under lock and key this time. It'll be interesting to see what some of these scenes entailed, but even more interesting to see the movie itself, which opens in eight days.